The vehement denials by Pakistan that its spy service and military have maintained close ties with the Taliban insurgency since 9/11 appear to be one of the biggest casualties of the leak of 92,000 U.S. military documents.

The classified military documents released on the Web site Wikileaks show top Pakistani officials deeply involved with the Taliban even as Pakistan continues to receive more than $1 billion in annual U.S. aid.

Senior members of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency said Monday that the disclosures are false and accused the United States of not being able to control intelligence leaks.

But the military reports -- most of which are written by American forces in the field -- are consistent with their own assessment of Pakistani involvement in Afghanistan, U.S. military officials top The Examiner.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who oversaw the administration's Afghanistan-Pakistan policy review last year, said the leaked information could lead to further erosion of U.S.-Pakistani information sharing and could potentially harm the war effort.

"An already strained relationship with Pakistan now has 91,731 new strains," Riedel said. "We fear ISI is playing a double game. ISI and every other intel service fears we can't keep a secret."

Within the tens of thousands of pages of classified documents, eight separate intelligence reports found that former ISI chief Hamid Gul played a direct role in aiding the Taliban. He is charged with ordering suicide bombings against NATO troops. Gul called the reports "a pack of lies" in an interview with Al-Jazeera on Monday.

Other reports -- numbering in the hundreds -- suggested that members of Pakistan's spy service were training and aiding the Taliban in Afghanistan. In one report, the ISI was planning to spike alcoholic drinks and "use them for poisoning international troops in Afghanistan." That report, and others like it, have led some analysts to dub the most extreme allegations against Pakistan as far-fetched.

White House national security adviser Jim Jones said Monday that release of the classified documents will only aid the enemy and put lives in jeopardy. The administration said Monday the leaks were a "breach of federal law."

Pentagon spokesman Col. Dave Lapan said Monday at a Pentagon briefing that the military takes the leak "very seriously." He said it could take weeks to review all of the documents.

"As they are made available, we will be looking at them to try to determine the potential damage to lives of our service members and our coalition partners," he told reporters.

Several Pakistani officials who spoke to The Examiner dismissed the reports as "dated and low-level."

"Over the past year, we have had much better relations with the U.S. and share operational information daily with our counterparts," said one senior Pakistani official, who noted that more than 70 ISI members have been killed in the last year fighting the Taliban insurgency.

James Carafano, the senior defense policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, said, "Everyone in Washington has known for a long time that members of Pakistan's ISI and military have aided the insurgency. That knowledge didn't stop the U.S. from trying to build relations with Pakistan, and the release of these documents won't change that."

But Carafano added the documents "will put a lot more pressure on the administration in terms of the war and drum up anti-war activists to get the administration to pull out."

Afghan officials are also concerned about the leaks and the damage to the war effort.

"It worries me that this will be part of the excuse the U.S. administration uses to pull out of the country before the job is done," said one Afghan official, on condition that he or she not be named. "Everyone here will lose if that happens."

Wahid Omar, spokesman for President Hamid Karzai, told reporters in Kabul that Karzai was "shocked" at the "huge number" of classified documents that were released.

Carafano said it was too soon to say whether the document release will have a major effect on the course of the war.

"If the current strategy turns out to be good, then the leaked documents will only be a blip on the radar screen. If we fail, then the documents will become part of a larger narrative," he said.

scarter@washingtonexaminer.com